Shadow of the Wolf Tree (3 page)

Treebone was at the Iron River Community Hospital, in outpatient surgery, having three pellets removed from his bicep. Service telephoned Treebone's wife, Kalina, who listened quietly and responded with uncharacteristic reserve. “He'll be okay, Kalina,” he said, trying to reassure her.

“It's you and that
damn
Upper Peninsula,” she said. “You're both magnets for crazy people, Grady Service.”

Service cringed, but couldn't disagree.

That night the officers all met at the DNR district office in Crystal Falls. Booby traps were cataloged and placed in the evidence locker.

“Good thing we got us a detective here,” Sergeant Schneider announced. “You want everybody to stick around?”

With the Law Enforcement Division's manpower down due to retirements, and no budget for replacements, most sergeants were all too happy to quickly pass complex cases to detectives in the Wildlife Resource Protection Unit. Regular officers were covering a lot more ground than usual, and often without reasonably close backup.

“No need for everyone to stay,” Service said, but he motioned for Elza Grinda to stay behind when the rest of the officers departed to head for their homes or to resume patrols.

“The group you tangled with last night,” Service began. “You think this is their work?”

“As far as I know, they've never seriously hurt anyone, so if this is theirs, their agenda's drastically changed.”

“You want to take me out to where you were last night, walk me through what happened?”

“Sure.”

They drove both trucks fifteen miles west to Iron River and stopped at the hospital. Treebone was asleep in post-op; his doctors wanted to keep him overnight to make sure everything was all right.

“Could have been two dead today,” Grinda said as they walked toward their trucks with Newf barking anxiously.

“Not your fault the victim died,” he said. “A wound like that's a death sentence.”

His mind was on the situation. If this was the same group, allegedly nonviolent, and if they had been clever enough to use battery-powered motion sensors last night, why were all the booby traps so crudely rigged, and where did a bunch of nonviolent fish-lovers learn to set spring guns and cure metal with the sort of knowledge only old-timer trappers tended to have? Evidence said this was one thing, but his gut said it was something else, and definitely not a slam-dunk.

3

Tamarack River, West Iron County

MONDAY, MAY 1, 2006

Service followed Grinda into the far west county where she veered off USFS Highway 147 onto the Rec, which stretched all the way from Ironwood to the Wisconsin border, south of Crystal Falls. They made their way a mile or so before coming to a gated crossroad. Grinda parked and came back to Service's truck.

“Camp's to the right.”

“This where you had the run-in?”

“No, west of the camp, by the river. I never got this far.”

“You saw the motion sensors?”

“No, but what else could it be? Afterwards I was too loopy and pissed to go searching for them.”

Service didn't ask her if the gate had been closed last night. Officers had the constitutional right to enter private property if they had probable cause. “What exactly did your informant tell you?”

“She said there were strangers around the camp, and she knows the owners live in Texas and are only up here June through September. They've also got a son from Flushing who comes up only for deer season. She called her son and he said he hadn't given permission to anyone.”

“Previous tips from this person?”

“Several. Her son's a longtime Gogebic dep. She lives on Tamarack Lake and walks over here.”

Which suggested the complainant herself might have been trespassing, Service noted.

“Let's just walk right in there,” he said, “introduce ourselves to anyone we find.”

Grinda shrugged, smiled, and rubbed the knot on the side of her head.

They found the camp empty, with no fresh tire marks in the dirt or grass lane that led back through scrub oaks and jack pines. Service looked at the cabin, but it was dark, and without probable cause they couldn't enter; even if they'd had cause he knew he'd ask for a search warrant first—just to be safe and legal. “How close were you to the cabin when you got jumped?”

“I couldn't see the camp, but I think I can find the spot.”

“Lead on,” he said.

They wended through young tamaracks, and old-growth white pine loggers somehow had missed in the last century. They descended into tag alders and Service could hear moving water. “The Tamarack?”

“Hundred yards,” she said. “There's a high bridge on the Rec Trail, and I came across a bend about a hundred yards below the bridge where the river swings west. I was trying to climb up the bank to higher ground when I got jumped.”

He didn't ask why she had taken such a circuitous route; good conservation officers rarely went directly to their destinations. When possible, it was better to ease your way into position and get a preview of what you were going to deal with. “Why the hell would they have sensors down in the tags?” he asked.

Grinda shook her head.

“Boots,” Service said, his command to Newf to stay by his side and not range ahead.

When Grinda finally located the place, Service found a blurry footprint and the broken aspen stick she'd been struck with. The stick was old, not freshly cut, meaning it probably had been grabbed up in a hurry; the attacker had not been carrying it as a weapon.

He said, “Female?”

Grinda nodded.

“Okay, let's see if we can find any more sign and take it from there. How much of this is private?” he asked.

“Just the forty with the camp. Everything else here is federal.”

“Tamarack Lake is southwest,” he said. “What's north?”

“Johnson's Lake.”

“Anything notable there?”

“Might have some brook trout. There's an outlet feeder down into the Tamarack.”

“You ever been back there?”

“Couple times, when I first got up here. It's roughly shaped like a Z. Got a creek running in from the north. Mostly cranberry bogs in the area, but Forest Road 4130 runs in above the creek source, about a third of a mile northeast of the lake. Whole area is a whole lot of nasty walking—sphagnum mats.”

Walking on sphagnum was like walking on a trampoline, except that sphagnum sometimes gave way and dropped you into the deep, liquefied, frigid peat Yoopers called loon shit. “You up to this?” he asked her.

“What do you think?”

“Let's get it done.” He touched the dog's head and said, “Okay,
find,
” and she started ahead of them, her head down, tail sweeping.

It took thirty minutes to find broken tag alders and a rough trail meandering north. At first it looked like a game trail, but Service found another blurred footprint of about the same size as the first one, and they stayed with that, the two of them flanking the trail on either side. Newf sniffed the print and began following.

Two hours later the trail, which skirted the lake briefly before angling due north, led them to the forest service two-track Grinda had talked about earlier. The area was a sprawling black spruce bog with low trees and soft ground. The two of them were tired when they reached the USFS road, and they were running out of daylight. Service said, “We'll come back in our trucks from the east, walk the road in, see what we can find.”

He walked around for a few minutes and came back. “Four-wheelers.”

“How many?” she asked.

“Two, maybe three.”

“First light?” she asked.

He laughed out loud. “We'll be lucky to get back to our trucks by first light, unless you know a shortcut.”

“No shortcuts out here,” Elza Grinda said.

“A warden's fate,” he said, touching Newf's head. “Truck, girl.” The dog took off at a trot.

“Does she expect us to keep up with her?” Grinda asked.

“Only if we want to find our way out.”

“I thought you had X-ray vision,” she said, trotting along near him.

“X-rated, not X-ray,” he said. Elza Grinda stopped running and began laughing out loud.

4

Johnson's Lake, West Iron County

TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2006

Grinda had tried to get him to come home and spend the night with del Olmo and her, but Service was distracted, his sixth sense making his soul taut with anticipation that this case was going to fly off in a strange and even more deadly direction.

After convincing Grinda he'd be fine on his own, he and Newf made their way through the maze of Forest Service roads to the one that dead-ended north of Johnson's Lake. He used a small propane stove to heat a can of Dinty Moore stew and fed the dog from a bag of stinky dry food he carried for her. Having eaten, he was restless. There was no point in looking for tracks in the dark because there was a good chance he might spoil them, so he took off on foot, avoiding the two-track, and made his way cross-country, back to the Tamarack River where Grinda had been attacked. Why here? There had to be a reason for the intruders to be here, and the fact that they'd jumped Grinda, and deployed motion sensors—if they had—suggested less-than-righteous reasons.

Even with the night temperature falling, the physical effort of fumbling around in the tag alders was sweaty, unproductive work. Eventually he slid into the river and waded downstream to where the river bent westward. The bottom was greasy loose cobble the locals called snot rocks, and the wading was tricky, but after a while he found a place where something had been crossing from south to north, and on the north bank, a body's length in, he found more: a huge coil of industrial-weight two-inch garden hose. His first thought: dope.

Working uphill from the hose, he made his way north into the cranberry bogs and waited for first light. Once the sun began to peek over the trees, it didn't take long to find where someone had stashed two dozen large plastic pots. Usually dope growers grew their weed in small forest clearings, but these pots were covered with black canvas, and he guessed they would put them in clusters around groves of black spruce so that spotting them from the air would be difficult.
Dope,
he told himself, almost smiling.
Not a damn thing to do with animal rights. Coincidence.

He got back to his truck minutes before Grinda and Simon arrived and had just enough time to brew coffee on his portable stove.

“You sleep at all last night?” del Olmo asked.

“More or less,” Service said.

“I'll put five on less,” his younger colleague said.

“Simon brought a casting kit,” Elza Grinda said.

“May not be that complex,” Service said. “Easier if we call UPSET and let them take it.”

Grinda stared at him. “Drugs?” UPSET was the Upper Peninsula Substance Enforcement Team, which covered most of the western U.P. and comprised personnel from the Troops and county sheriffs' departments.

Service explained. “I found hoses hidden down by the river, and they've got empty pots up in the peat bogs above the lake. Probably just one of multiple sites. Maybe they have the plants growing inside right now, waiting for the last frost to be done. Who knows? The logic of druggies doesn't register with the rest of us. You know anybody on the team?”

“Julie Jenks. She's a dep with the county.”

Service could see fire in Grinda's eyes and hear it in her voice, and tried to calm her. “I know they jumped you, but if you give it to UPSET and they make the bust, they can bring the assault into the case.”

“She's genetically wired for payback,” Simon said, taking a step away from his girlfriend.

Grinda smirked. “It's a woman thing.”

Service took them to see the pots and the hose, and by mid-morning they had taken photos and casts of four-wheeler tracks and eased their way out of the area. Was it normal for eco-nuts to be growing dope? He didn't know, but he knew someone who might. Chances were the dope farmers had nothing to do with what had happened on the South Branch, or any eco-groups.

“Why LF Two?” he asked Grinda.

“
FBI Bulletin,
” Grinda said. “You don't read yours?”

“I prefer my fiction to be labeled as such.”

“They believe LF Two is up to something this year, specifically day two of the fishing season. They figured there'd be too many of us lurking about on opening day.”

“Day two? They must have had something specific,” he said. “Did your complainant mention the group by name?”

“No. She just said that there were some skulkers.”

“And you added two and two.”

“Better to expect four and get nothing than vice versa. Assume the worst, right?”

He couldn't disagree, and they had assaulted her. “Probably just dopers, but there's something I can't dislodge from my thick skull: If this outfit wants to make a dramatic splash and get coverage, why the hell do it up here? They'd get a helluva lot more attention on the Au Sable or one of the famous rivers downstate where there's more activity. If your mission is to sabotage fishing and get attention from the media, why bury yourself in the boondocks?”

Grinda considered the question. “Maybe because there
aren't
many people there, which means body count would be low, but the point still would be made.”

He hadn't considered this angle and wasn't sure he bought it, but she had a point, and he acknowledged the possibility with an accepting grunt.

“You going to take the case?” del Olmo asked.

“Have to check with my el-tee,” Service said. “But probably it will be mine.”

“You seeing much of Captain Grant these days?” Grinda asked.

Now one of only two captains in DNR law enforcement, Grant was on the road almost all the time. “Nope.” The captain was in Lansing most days of the week and living in a motel somewhere down there.

“The department's in a state of flux,” Grinda said.

“
Bloody
flux,” Service answered. DNR law enforcement had not undergone a major reorganization in years, but he suspected the captain would work to change that and try to create a department streamlined to deal with realities on the ground.

“We're bleeding personnel,” del Olmo pointed out.

Grinda said, “Maybe they'll try to outsource law enforcement to the private sector.”

Service couldn't help laughing. “Good—we'll all quit and create our own organization to bid on the contract. We'll call it Swampwater USA. What private security firm would be so stupid as to want a contract with a sinking ship of state? The feds can print money. Lansing can't. Besides, they'd have to pay us so much more, the state couldn't afford our service.”

The conversation and the events of the past two days had left him with a sour stomach. “Catch you later. I'm headed home to get myself organized.”

“What about Tree?” del Olmo asked.

“I'll spring him from the hospital on my way back to Slippery Creek. He won't head for home until Kalina raises hell with him. He'll spend the summer at his camp or my place, chasing brook trout. She makes him come home about once a month just to make sure her mojo still has juice.”